| Miguel_Zorro said: The inflation argument is valid, but only to a point. The argument that people have far more "other options" today is also very valid. |
Again, if you'd like to know which is "more valid" check out the OP's list. It's dominated by movies from the last 10-12 years. The reason? Because the "inflation argument" has a far, far greater impact than the "other options" argument, or any other argument.
| When Gone With the Wind came out? You had to go to the movie theatre if you wanted to see it *at all*. It also came out during World War 2, when there really wasn't much else to do for fun. For the 2+ years that it was in the theatres, the only competition that it had was a bunch of movies that I doubt many people have ever heard of. |
That said, movies have always had to compete with other forms of entertainment. The people of 1939 didn't just lie in bed staring at their ceilings. Sure, they didn't have many of the forms of entertainment that *we* enjoy today, but they didn't know that they were missing anything; they had full lives anyways.
That's why the top grossers list *doesn't* have a bunch of movies from the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc., when people supposedly had nothing better to do. Gone With the Wind is the *only* film from that era on the list, right? The only one even close. It sticks out for a reason--because it sold a ton of tickets.
Finally, as for its competition... this is what Wikipedia has to say about the movies in 1939:
Movie historians and film buffs often look back on 1939 as "the greatest year in film history". Hollywood was at the height of its Golden Age, and this particular year saw the release of an unusually large number of exceptional movies, many of which have been honored as all-time classics, when multitudes of other films of the era have been largely forgotten.
